Ssh – Why is vimdiff so slow

When typing in a shell over an SSH connection, every character you press needs to be sent to the remote side, interpreted, and sent back to be displayed if appropriate. This involves at least set of packets to make a round trip to and from your ssh server. If your network connection has a lot of latency, this can become quite noticeable. Even if the overall bandwidth is slow, if the latency is moderate it is usable, but if the round trip time starts growing typing becomes painful.

The only practical fix for this is to reduce the latency in the network connection. If this is not possible use a local shell and write scripts to be executed remotely rather than working directly on the remote machine.

The default ssh settings make for a pretty slow connection. Try the following instead:

ssh -YC4c arcfour,blowfish-cbc user@hostname firefox -no-remote

The options used are:

-Y      Enables trusted X11 forwarding.  Trusted X11 forwardings are not
         subjected to the X11 SECURITY extension controls.
 -C      Requests compression of all data (including stdin, stdout,
         stderr, and data for forwarded X11 and TCP connections).  The
         compression algorithm is the same used by gzip(1), and the
         “level” can be controlled by the CompressionLevel option for pro‐
         tocol version 1.  Compression is desirable on modem lines and
         other slow connections, but will only slow down things on fast
         networks.  The default value can be set on a host-by-host basis
         in the configuration files; see the Compression option.
 -4      Forces ssh to use IPv4 addresses only.
 -c cipher_spec
         Selects the cipher specification for encrypting the session.

         For protocol version 2, cipher_spec is a comma-separated list of
         ciphers listed in order of preference.  See the Ciphers keyword
         in ssh_config(5) for more information.

The main point here is to use a different encryption cypher, in this case arcfour which is faster than the default, and to compress the data being transferred.

NOTE: I am very, very far from an expert on this. The command above is what I use after finding it on a blog post somewhere and I have noticed a huge improvement in speed. I am sure the various commenters below know what they're talking about and that these encryption cyphers might not be the best ones. It is very likely that the only bit of this answer that is truly relevant is using the -C switch to compress the data being transferred.